What point that often I find stunning is the comparison of when I talk to the chiefs in large organisations compared to owners of small businesses (SMB). The leaders know less, much less but what they do know is relevant and essential to the problem at hand. The owner of an SMB, often does not know anything. The owner has all the details in their head, the pixels that they know little of the big picture.

I do not believe that retail business has ever had access to such a wealth of information as they do today.

A conversation might start, what is your top seller? The owner often gives a blank stare, well we sell a lot of this and that what is the top seller, it could be.... Yet the information is available in their POS system here.

If you are seeing that you need to discount a lot to sell stock you are overstocked, it is a sure sign that you need to do something. As a punt what is happening is that you are overordering on some items and probably underordering on others. What often we see in retail is that our memory is by definition the past and the memory remembers old top sellers but what we need is the top sellers today. Here is how to identify what is selling well now to check that you have enough stock for tomorrow and it is very easy in our point of sale system.

Go to Register reports

Select the "Top N Stock Sales for a Given Period"

Now out pops the following.

Now select a day, as it is an old database I put in an old date. Usually, you would put in yesterday or today, just make sure you get close to a full day of trading.